Bill Mullins wrote: Earlier, Chris, you asked about other's work being used without credit.

Incorrect again. You made a very strong accusation that I did pass on work of others as mine. Olsson's report has been inserted into my ebook verbatim. It is his. It is also clearly marked where it starts and were it ends. Before you start throwing around such serious accusations please have the necessary data to back them up. I am still waiting for you to back up your accusation that I have appropriated work of others and passed it on as mine.

Denis Behr wrote:Are you serious? It's hard to believe that you are. In your example, if I find something in The New Modern Coin Magic and want to know if it's in Modern Coin Magic, I simply check this book. There are only those two. No problem. With your ebook? No idea. There is nothing I can check. The creation date is, as far as the reader is concerned, the publication date. Previous history cannot be traced. I'm surprised that you cannot see the difference.

Of course you could check if you did buy the ebook early enough to have access to all prior editions. You are complaining that you do not have access to an early edition that you did not buy. Every customer of the ebook has access to the last edition which is the one that should be used anyway. All prior editions are limited to those who bought the ebook early enough to have had access to them. What's your problem here?

The problem is that only the sketchy creation date of a pdf can be used when trying to trace an item in the published record. One cannot know in which year information was published, as the ebook can change any time without a change log.

Denis Behr wrote:The problem is that only the sketchy creation date of a pdf can be used when trying to trace an item in the published record. One cannot know in which year information was published, as the ebook can change any time without a change log.

What are you talking about? What do you mean with 'sketchy creation date'? That is the actual date Adobe inserts when the PDF is created. There is nothing sketchy about it. It is more accurate and more meaningful than an edition number or a publishing year as is typically used in books. The creation date is year, month, day and even has the time of day. That is more information than you find in any printed book.

Denis Behr wrote:Ok, please strike the word "sketchy" from my post. The second sentence is the important part.

This has nothing to do with the Erdnase thread, so I'll better stop complaining.

You got that right. There is nothing to complain about. You can track changes with ebooks the same way you do with books and more. The creation date is fixed in the PDF. And you can check the various versions of PDFs (if you have bought them) for changes either manually as you would with a printed book, or automatically with software. There is nothing to complain about. It is bitching about something that is not there. It is attacking me for the sake of attacking without any basis.

lybrary wrote: When you quote from "The New Modern Coin Magic" I have no way of knowing if it is also in "Modern Coin Magic". It is no different with printed books. You guys simply try to be difficult.

Sure you can. If it is after p. 354, it is from New Modern Coin Magic. If it is from before that, it is from Modern Coin Magic and New Modern Coin Magic as well. The later book reprints the earlier one in its entirety (except for the preface), and adds new material at the end. It is very easy to tell what has been changed.

You probably could not have picked a worse example of an updated magic book to make the point.

Suppose I'm trying to talk with Denis about Hunt for Erdnase. To establish that we have the same book, we both have to check creation dates and exchange that information. If it turns out that the dates are different, we know that we don't have the same book, but we don't know how they are different. The only way to tell in accordance with what I believe your licensing states is for both of us to download a 3rd party software package, and for each of us to download the "current" copy of HfE, compare the current copy with the copy we originally purchased and downloaded, create an errata list, and compare the lists. I can't directly compare my copy with his, and he can't directly compare his copy with mine. (Obviously, a casual reader won't go to this trouble, and if he runs into a discrepancy, he'll just say "screw it" and move on with his life. Me, I'm too anal retentive to live so recklessly.)

On the other hand, if we are discussing New Modern Coin Magic, we just talk about the book, because it is fixed and doesn't change.

You've mentioned your publication of papers in IEEE journals, so I know that matters of scholarship are important to you. I'm surprised that you don't see an evolving book without open records of that evolution as problematic.

Bill Mullins wrote:Sure you can. If it is after p. 354, it is from New Modern Coin Magic. If it is from before that, it is from Modern Coin Magic and New Modern Coin Magic as well. The later book reprints the earlier one in its entirety (except for the preface), and adds new material at the end. It is very easy to tell what has been changed.

Not according to the publisher Magic Inc. Apparently there are changes throughout. But regardless of the example, you understand what is at issue. Unless you have both versions you can't check printed editions either. And unless you actually do manually look through the entire book you do not know for sure what has changed. A new edition could have been reorganized with sections and parts moving to different places such as the Tarbell antology. That means you have to check everything. With ebooks you can search and use software to automatically detect changes. So it is clearly much better supported with ebooks than with printed books.

Bill Mullins wrote:Suppose I'm trying to talk with Denis about Hunt for Erdnase. To establish that we have the same book, we both have to check creation dates and exchange that information. If it turns out that the dates are different, we know that we don't have the same book, but we don't know how they are different. The only way to tell in accordance with what I believe your licensing states is for both of us to download a 3rd party software package, and for each of us to download the "current" copy of HfE, compare the current copy with the copy we originally purchased and downloaded, create an errata list, and compare the lists. I can't directly compare my copy with his, and he can't directly compare his copy with mine. (Obviously, a casual reader won't go to this trouble, and if he runs into a discrepancy, he'll just say "screw it" and move on with his life. Me, I'm too anal retentive to live so recklessly.)

That is such a contrived example without any important use case. Both of you have access to the latest version. Every customer no matter when the ebook was bought has access to the latest version. So you simply both use the latest version to communicate. When something was corrected is for the vast vast cases completely irrelevant. And for those few cases where you want to know when something changed you use the diff software. In our updated emails we do mention big changes for the very reason to inform customers what they may want to re-read. But we do not maintain a detailed log that tracks every typo. Your complaint is a non-issue for 99.99% of customers. And for those 0.01% customers, I have outlined a process how you can find every change and track its progression through time. The tools are free, and the process is automated. That is a whole lot better than any print publication can offer you. I don't think you have reasons to complain.

lybrary wrote:And for those who want to find the difference between two PDF files get for example a free software called diffpdf (available for Windows and Linux). This will allow you to quickly see what has changed. See, wasn't too hard. Problem solved.

The problem is solved for only 20 days -- after that, the trial license expires and it costs $140 to keep using.

Bill Mullins wrote:You've mentioned your publication of papers in IEEE journals, so I know that matters of scholarship are important to you. I'm surprised that you don't see an evolving book without open records of that evolution as problematic.

What you should have said is that you are one of those folks who like to understand what has changed from one edition of a book to another. That challenge always existed. If you look at 5 editions of a printed textbook you cannot tell what has changed unless you carefully and manually study each edition, compare them, make notes, and find out what has changed. The same challenge exists with ebooks. Ebooks are no different in this respect. They have distinct editions and if you want to know what has changed from one edition to another you have to compare them. The second thing you should have said is that now with ebooks the challenge has become a lot easier, because now you can use software to compare two editions. Rather than spending days and weeks comparing two print editions you can pop it into a software and in seconds you get a list of changes. So the situation is completely opposite of what you have made it out to be. Ebooks make it easier to track changes not harder.

The first big "success" of textual analysis to identify authors was a 1963 study by Fred Mosteller and David Wallace to identify the author of some of the Federalist Papers. Here is a good background article on the subject.

(If the name "Mosteller" seems familiar to you, it should be. He was an amateur magician, with a couple of credits in The Phoenix and elsewhere, in addition to being a statistics professor. It was to Mosteller that Martin Gardner wrote a letter recommending Persi Diaconis for admission to Harvard, based on the strength of some card tricks rather than any proficiency in mathematics. That ended up turning out well.)

I am interested in knowing about the "family tree" of The Expert at the card table meaning... if we was to lay out each sleight published in this book what would a "family tree" type diagram of the history of each sleight leading up to the publication of this historic book look like.

A good deal of this work has already been done. Busby and Whaley, in The Man Who Was Erdnase, give precedents for many of the sleights, as does Darwin Ortiz in The Annotated Erdnase. More recently Jason England has done the same in his notes Erdnase: Past, Present and Future. The Conjuring Credits website documents the early uses of many sleights and tricks, and the translations of old magic books in Gibiciere have done likewise.

One context to see Erdnase in is as history of cards at that time. I think it is important to decide if you are looking for something to use in the 'real world' or to study as an academic field. Meanwhile, in memory of Geof Latta, I seem to remember he had a pretty good Diagonal Palm Shift. And a really amazing 2-hand pass. I would say though that there are modern books which contain more of the state of the art today. Any of Steve Forte's videos or Darwin Ortiz's books have methods and handlings which are more practical than Erdnase. Arts are tweaked and refined over the years until they hardly resemble the old ways. Regards, Gregg Webb ps the Geof Latta book on Coins will be out soon and I think there is talk about a book after that on Geof's card work.

Potter & Potter's auction over the weekend included a Drake HB edition with the pictorial cover that went for $4800 plus fee. I believe this is a record for a non-first edition (and it wasn't that long ago that it would have been a record, period).

And their Gambling auction in early May includesa 1st edition, a Drake HB pictorial (in blue this time), an early Drake paperback, a Fleming with the scarcer plain tan DJ, a centennial edition, and a lot of modern editions plus related books.

While I don't think the recent acceleration in the prices will continue, I don't foresee a return to the prices of 10 years ago, when you'd get a 1905 pictorial Drake on eBay for $400 - 500. These recent price increases will top out here pretty soon (I think), but my suspicion is they'll level off rather than return to lower levels.

John and Jason, when it comes to the Erdnase market, I’m sure you have your finger on the pulse far better than I do. My less-sanguine view reflects seeing a number of “booms and busts” in magicana prices over the past 45 years of collecting. You guys may be too young to remember, but (for example) in the 1980s Hoffmann and Goldston books were hot commodities. Now? Not so much. A decent copy of the 1st edition of Modern Magic used to cost $2,000, now it seems to run in the $400-$600 range – a 70%-80% drop in value.

I’m hard pressed to think of any reasons why early Erdnase editions should be so different when it comes to popularity cycles and supply and demand. But I’m ready to be educated to the contrary.

I've been collecting Erdnase seriously for about 15 years I guess. Not really sure when I first "noticed" that I had a collection, but I bought my first edition in 2004 (I think) and that was 13 years ago.

At the upcoming Potter and Potter auction in May is another first edition of 'The Expert at the Card Table' for sale. Lot number 359. On Instagram I posted a clip of the bidding during an earlier auction: https://www.instagram.com/p/BFt1StJPrj5/BTW and I'm so happy with my facsimile edition!

I also have the Coles edition. It is falling to bits just like myself. No picture of Erdnase on the cover though. I like it far better than the Dover effort as the print is at least bold and readable. I remember reading the book years ago and being astonished that I could do many of the sleights already since they had already been described in the Royal Road to Card Magic. And it didn't take me long to learn most of the other moves either. I never did learn any of the tricks though.

If you've not seen Elementary, I would recommend watching the first season on NetFlix instead of this offering, as an introduction. In many ways Elementary is better than Sherlock, but this episode is more plot driven.

The strength of this show is the new take on Holmes' personal demons...

That edition appears to be rebound with the corners rounded. I've never seen any hardbound Drake editions from 1937, just the paperbacks with the King of Hearts front cover. The only English language editions I know of with a dust jacket were the Powner/Fleming version, with two different dust jackets.

Bill Mullins wrote:Card Mastery by Mickey MacDougall contains the full text of Expert and exists in a hardbound edition with DJ.

I'd put the MacDougall in the category of "annotated" editions (I guess the Fleming/Powner could also be considered that, since it included the Professor Hoffmann comments) and if we're including those, then Darwin's Annotated Erdnase and the various Vernon Revelation(s) and David Ben's The Experts at the Card Table could also be considered hardback Erdnase editions with dust jackets.